'my protagonist is...'

I want this noise within me to die down.

Like the word “pulchritude,” which means “beauty” but sounds revolting, the phrase “wintry mix” is unforgivably dishonest. It sounds like something you would bring to a holiday party: toasted hazelnuts, dried cranberries, dark chocolate, tied up in a cellophane bag with maroon and gold ribbons. It sounds like something you would drink at that party: brandy, bitters, sweet vermouth. It sounds like something the host would have on in the background: Bing Crosby, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” Coltrane covering “My Favorite Things.” It sounds like sleigh bells at dusk. It sounds like snowflakes drifting from darkness into the light of a streetlamp when the blizzard is just getting started and the hush of rightness has fallen over the world. It sounds wonderful. Too bad. It is a cold, wet, sharp, splashy, slush-creating, hypothermia-inducing abomination, a wrongness falling over the world. A better name for it would be “airborne depravity.” A better name for it would be “meteorological pox.” A better name for it would be “pulchritude.”

slit

so, those that attempt to contact the things that they’ve lost are called necromancers. I get that, we all want to romance the past every once in a while. but what do you call it when, in gusts of nostalgia, you LOVE what’s not there? when you skip the niceties and head straight for that uncommunicable feeling of need like a dreamer to a mirage, when it’s been six weeks and you’re still kissing the right side of the bed before you roll out of it still crying in the soft drink aisle at the grocery store still committing to memory the shape that their spine took as they walked away from you: a question mark without an answer without a question without a reason. I guess this is my way of saying that I need a name for what I’m doing. the quiet just isn’t enough, anymore.

Some days I’m Van Gogh’s Starry Night other days I’m his suicide letter.

Baritone’s Elegy

The underlying issue of the Academy’s failure to recognize black artists is the presumption that baseline experience is white experience and that black life is a niche phenomenon, life with an asterisk. Many of the great classic jazz and blues recordings were marketed as ‘race records.’ To this day, the Academy proceeds as if movies about black experience were race movies. The result is that only narrow and fragmentary views of the lives of African-Americans ever make it to the screen—and I think that this is not an accident. If the stories were told—if the daily lives and inner lives, the fears and fantasies, the historical echoes and the anticipations of black Americans were as copiously unfolded in movies as are those of whites—then lots of white folks would be forced to confront their historical and contemporary shame. They’d no longer be able to claim ignorance of what they’d like not to know—which includes their own complicity in a rigged system.

Finding Your Old